Remote by Donn Cortez

five hundred bottles in the world, and had cost him twenty-five hundred dollars at auction.   He mixed it with a little water and added a few ice cubes, chuckling at the memory of winning the bid; he’d made a point of sending the loser a recording of him mixing a shot of it with Dr. Pepper and drinking it with a big grin on his face. 
    Winning wasn’t enough.  Making someone else your bitch—that was where the true pleasure lay. . .
     
    ***
    Nikki was a pro.
    Hooker, escort, lady of the evening, working girl, whore—she’d used every term at one point or another.  “Sex trade worker” was the one she preferred, for two reasons: one, it defined what she did as a job—not a kink, not a crime, not a disease.  She performed a service and got paid for it, same as anyone else.  Two, the term had the word “trade” right in the middle of it, and she liked that.  The extension of trade was tradition, and that suggested a long and honorable history that belonged right up there with carpenters, weavers, farmers. . .
    And hunters.  Especially hunters.
    Every job in the world demanded you trade time and effort for the tools of survival: food, clothes, a roof over your head.  A little perspiration in return for a little security, that was how the world worked.  If you happened to enjoy your job that was a bonus for you, and if what you did made the world a little better place to live in that was a bonus for everyone else. 
    Nikki didn’t particularly enjoy what she did to pay the rent, and she wasn’t sure whether or not it made the world a better place—it made the world a little less horny, anyway—but, like many people with a job as opposed to a career, she found satisfaction outside her workplace.  Well, technically it was an extension of her work, but she rarely got paid for it.  No, she did it because—
    Nikki stared at her reflection in the mirrored wall of the nightclub, painted in flashes of lurid color by the dance floor lights somewhere behind her.  Why the hell do I do this?
    I’m a human bullseye, a fish on a hook.  I put myself out there to draw in homicidal crazies, so my partner can stage his own personal re-enactment of the Spanish Inquisition for them.  Sooner or later we’re going to get caught by the cops or go up against the wrong guy and wind up in an unmarked grave.  After, of course, we’ve been raped to death by farm implements. 
    She shook her head and tossed back her drink, signaled the waitress for another.  She always got fast service, mainly because she gave her server half their tip up front; they’d work a little harder when they knew what was coming. 
    When they’d started out, she and Jack had made a deal: she took one kind of risk, he took another.  She was the bait, but Jack was the trap—and snapping shut on prey took its own toll over time.  No matter sharp Jack made himself, no matter how hard, he was still made of flesh and not steel.  He didn’t enjoy what he did any more than Nikki enjoyed giving a stranger a blowjob in the back seat of a minivan. 
    But sooner or later, what Jack did would destroy him.
    Nikki had seen the street swallow a lot of people.  Violence, prison, addiction and disease were the Four Horsemen of Self-Destruction when you were in the life, and they had no problem teaming up to take a victim down.  The first two were always waiting in the shadows for Jack, but the one he fought every time he opened that damn case and laid out his tools was worse than any of them.  Nikki didn’t even know what to call it; what kind of name do you give the force that’s slowly eroding your humanity itself?  Obsession?  Insanity?  Oblivion? 
    The Patron would have called it art.
    Nikki knew that her fate would come down to two very simple possible outcomes: she would survive, or she wouldn’t.  But Jack . . .
    Jack was dying by inches.  And he knew it. 
    And as much as she hated to admit it, as much as it pissed her off to define